San Francisco –– While our eyes have somewhat habituated to the herky-jerky, average YouTube video shot by amateurs, the popular Google owned video-sharing site YouTube wants to make it better for us, and to raise those standards. Just after snapping up Next New Networks, YouTube has acquired “Green Parrot Pictures,” a digital-video technology company that specializes in high-quality picture manipulation.
Henceforth, higher-quality videos may result from YouTube’s acquisition of Green Parrot Pictures, the six-year-old start-up based in Dublin that specializes in video restoration and enhancement, which Google hopes will make clips on YouTube sharper, steadier and lower in image noise.
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Green Parrot Pictures, whose technology has been used in movies, is expected to help YouTube improve home movies during the uploading process. Its technologies aims to provide post-production quality video footage “on any device” with less bandwidth and playback time. In the video below, a low-quality video is given GPP’s color transfer treatment.
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In a blog post yesterday, Jeremy Doig, Director, Google Video Technology, wrote that Green Parrot has technology that can sharpen images, reduce visual noise and render a higher-quality, steadier video all while it is uploading.
According to an industry analyst, the deal will help YouTube move to bigger screens as it battles with Apple, Hulu and Netflix.
The Green Parrot site provides some insights into the technology behind their improvements:
Our Oscar winning motion estimation technology allows us to use information from multiple frames to improve image quality overall. However any realistic video processing toolkit must acknowledge the fact that sometimes weird things happen in moving pictures. Motion blur, self occluding motion and non-rigid or transparent objects all cause pictures to behave in a way that make it difficult to exploit multiple frames. Therefore we have developed tools that check themselves for providing good quality information and we use that self diagnostic to make sure that the output is as good as it can be.
Another example of Green Parrot’s restoration techniques…
{iframe width=”620″ height=”390″ align=”top”}http://www.youtube.com/embed/acKfSLN31fI{/iframe}
Doig wrote, “Their technology may come in handy in particular for videos shot under pressure with low-quality devices, such as camera phones, in situations such as street protests, at the same time using less bandwidth and improving playback speed.”
According to a blog post, YouTube bought the start-up for an undisclosed sum in order to improve the quality of the massive volume of footage on its site; YouTube claims that 35 hours of videos are uploaded to its site every minute. Although some of those videos are professionally produced, crystal-clear presentations filmed with HD cameras, more are home-movie quality shot with mobile phones. Videos of the recent protests in Libya are a prime example. They were captivating, yet most were jerky, blurry or unsteady.
Green Parrot Pictures’ video improvement technology has been used in big-budget films such as “Lord of the Rings,” “X-Men” and “Spider Man.” Green Parrot Pictures CEO Anil Kokaram is also an associate professor at Trinity College Dublin.
“We are thrilled to join Google, where we will apply our expertise to improve the online video experience for hundreds of millions of users worldwide on many different products, platforms, and services,” Green Parrot said in a note on its Web site.
“With the equivalent of over 170,000 full-length movies uploaded to YouTube every week, the team’s experience in this area — working on solutions for both video consumers and experts alike — will be a source of new ideas and further innovation at YouTube and across Google. We look forward to working with them to make the videos you upload every minute of every day to our site look even better,” Doig wrote.